To:HIS MOTHER AND HIS SISTER MARIA

Published:First published in 1929 in the journalProletarskaya RevolyutsiyaNo. 2-3.

      Sent from Shushenskoye 
 to Switzerland.

      Printed from 
 the original.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1977,

      Moscow,Volume 37,

      pages120-122.Translated:The Late George H. HannaTranscription\Markup:D. MorosPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive.You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.

July 19,  1897

Yesterday,Mother dearest, I received your letter and
Manyasha’s dated the 29th.Mercifor them.

Becauseof the exceptionally long time our letters take,
answers to questions arrive so long after they are asked
that many of them turn out to be unnecessary. In this
letter, for instance, you are still worrying about money and
the bale of books—it is now, of course, a long time since
you received my letter explaining all that; I received the
money a long time ago, I did not draw it for some time
because I did not need it and because nobody came from A.M.
I still have not received the bale of books; I do not know
if it has arrived in Krasnoyarsk (it was expected there at
the end of June), and from there it will be brought by
someone coming here whom I expect shortly. To send it from
Krasnoyarsk by post would probably cost quite a lot because
the post is not sent by steamer but by rail to Achinsk and
from there by road to Minusinsk.

Similarlyyou also must know by now not only that Mark
has received an offer to go to St. Petersburg, but also what
decision he has made; he wrote me that he was awaiting an
answer from you from abroad.

Ireceived your letter with details of the Kokushkino
business and have already answered it. Yesterday, too, I
received the first letter from Mitya in which he, too,
described his trip to Kazan.

Asfar as hygiene is concerned, I do not think I am any
worse off here than you are in
Spiez.[5]I also bathe(sometimes twice a day) in the Yenisei, take
walks[1]and go
shooting. It is true that there are no decent walks near here, but
for shooting we sometimes wander a long way, and there
are some nice places.

YesterdayI received news from Tesinskoye about a
wedding—Basil and A.M. I am invited to be best
man.[6]It
will not take place very soon, of course.

Iam very sorry about Pyotr
Kuzmich![2]Your letter
was the only news I had heard of him.

Kisses—andplease do not worry about me.

Yours,V. U.

Ihave received a letter from the doctor from Verkholensk
(Irkutsk Gubernia), where he has been sent. N. Y.
Fedoseyev has also been sent there.

Youask me to describe the village of Shu-shu-shu.... Hm!
Hm! I think I did describe it to you once. It is a big
village with several streets, rather muddy, dusty—everything
as it should be. It stands in the steppes—there are no
orchards or greenery of any kind. The village is surrounded
by dung, which the people here do not cart to the fields
but dump outside the village, so that if you leave the
village you always have to pass through a certain amount
of dung. There is a stream called the Shush right beside
the village; now it is very shallow. At about a verst or a
verst and a half from the village (or rather fromme—the
village is a long one) the Shush joins the Yenisei which breaks
up here into a large number of streams with islands between
them so that there is no way of reaching the mainstream on
foot. I bathe in the biggest stream, which is now also very
shallow. On the other side (the opposite direction from
the River Shush) there is, at a distance of about a verst
and a half, what the peasants quite seriously call “the pine
grove”; it is really a very poor bit of woodland, in whichmost of the trees have been felled so that there is no real
shade (but a lot of strawberries!); it bears no resemblance
to real Siberian taiga which I have as yet only heard
about but have never been in (it is at least some thirty
or forty versts from here). Mountains ... when I wrote about
those mountains I was very inaccurate, for they areabout
50 verstsfrom here so that you can only look at them, when
they are not hidden by clouds, in exactly the same way
as you can see Mont Blanc from Geneva. Because of this
the first (and last) line of my poem contains a sort of poetic
hyperbole (the figure is used by poets!), about “Sayan’s
foot”.[3]I can give only one answer, therefore, to your
question about which mountains I have climbed—-the sandhills
in the “pine grove”, so called—and in general there is
plenty of sand about here.

Mywork is progressing very, very
slowly.[4]I do not know
whether I shall need any extracts from books. I hope that
by autumn I shall make an arrangement with some Moscow
or St. Petersburg library.

Iread with pleasure your description of life abroad and
your impressions from there. I should be glad if you would
write to me more often.

Yourplan to send “a pood of cherries” here, over a
distance of six thousand versts and a bit, made me open my
mouth in amazement (not from a desire to gorge myself on
cherries—there aren’t any here but there will be water
melons) at the richness of your imagination. What are our
chemists, compared with this!

Yours,V. U.

[1]Iwear a net to protect myself from the swarms of mosquitoes
we have here. And they say this is nothing compared with the north!
—Lenin

[2]PyotrKuzmich Zaporozhets.—Ed.

[3]SeeLetter No. 24—Ed.

[4]Thisrefers to Lenin’s work onThe Development of Capitalism
in Russia.—Ed.

[5]Spiez—a village on the shore of Lake Thun in Switzerland,
where Lenin’s mother and his sister Maria were spending a
holiday at that time.

[6]Leninattended the wedding of V. V. Starkov and A. M.
Rosenberg, which took place in Tesinskoye on July 30, 1897.